Summary: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of--From publisher description.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly."-- Entertainment Weekly <br> <br> NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE * ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN), "DEFINING" ( LITHUB ), AND "BEST" ( THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER ) BOOKS OF THE DECADE * WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION <br> <br> NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * Entertainment Weekly * O: The Oprah Magazine * NPR * Financial Times * New York * Independent (U.K.) * Times (U.K.) * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal * Kirkus Reviews * Booklist * Globe and Mail <br> <br> Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. <br> <br> Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.<br> <br> Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. <br> <br> Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? <br> <br> Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of--From publisher description.

$26.00 3-2010 (db)

BRA $26.00 3-2010

$26.00 5/3/2010

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

A Few Words About This Book (p. ix)

Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph (p. 1)

Deborah's Voice (p. 9)

Part 1 Life

1 The Exam...1951 (p. 13)

2 Clover...1920- 1942 (p. 18)

3 Diagnosis and Treatment...1951 (p. 27)

4 The Birth of HeLa...1951 (p. 34)

5 "Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside"...1951 (p. 42)

6 "Lady's on the Phone"...1999 (p. 49)

7 The Death and Life of Cell Culture...1951 (p. 56)

8 "A Miserable Specimen"...1951 (p. 63)

9 Turner Station...1999 (p. 67)

10 The Other Side of the Tracks...1999 (p. 77)

11 "The Devil of Pain Itself"...1951 (p. 83)

Part 2 Death

12 The Storm...1951 (p. 89)

13 The HeLa Factory...1951-1953 (p. 93)

14 Helen Lane...1953-1954 (p. 105)

15 "Too Young to Remember"...1951-1965 (p. 110)

16 "Spending Eternity in the Same Place"...1999 (p. 118)

17 Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable...1954-1966 (p. 127)

18 "Strangest Hybrid"...1960-1966 (p. 137)

19 "The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now"...1966-1973 (p. 144)

20 The HeLa Bomb...1966 (p. 152)

21 Night Doctors...2000 (p. 158)

22 "The Fame She So Richly Deserves"...1970-1973 (p. 170)

Part 3 Immortality

23 "It's Alive"...1973-1974 (p. 179)

24 "Least They Can Do"...1975 (p. 191)

25 "Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?"...1976-1988 (p. 199)

26 Breach of Privacy...1980-1985 (p. 207)

27 The Secret of Immortality...1984-1995 (p. 212)

28 After London...1996-1999 (p. 218)

29 A Village of Henriettas...2000 (p. 232)

30 Zakariyya...2000 (p. 241)

31 Hela, Goddess of Death...2000-2002 (p. 250)

32 "All That's My Mother"...2001 (p. 259)

33 The Hospital for the Negro Insane...2001 (p. 268)

34 The Medical Records...2001 (p. 279)

35 Soul Cleansing...2001 (p. 286)

36 Heavenly Bodies...2001 (p. 294)

37 "Nothing to Be Scared About"...2001 (p. 297)

38 The Long Road to Clover...2009 (p. 305)

Where They Are Now (p. 311)

Afterword (p. 315)

Acknowledgments (p. 329)

Notes (p. 338)

Index (p. 359)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

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<anon I1="BLANK" I2="BLANK">PROLOGUE The Woman in the Photograph There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her--a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is "Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson." No one knows who took that picture, but it's appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She's usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She's simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world's first immortal human cells-- her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks. I've spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she'd think about cells from her cervix living on forever--bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she--like most of us--would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. There's no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta's cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons--an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they'd wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall. I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn't understand, like "MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations." I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler's class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost. "Do we have to memorize everything on tho Excerpted from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.</anon>
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Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Starred Review. Accessible science at its best, the audio version gives the story of Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, all the gravity and pathos it deserves. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell and Bahni Turpin, who also worked together on The Help. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.